Prior to his appointment as ARCAA Director, Duncan served as IEEE Qld Chair for the joint chapters of Control Systems and Robotics and Automation (2008-2009). He holds much international collaboration in both automation research and engineering curriculum reform. Duncan was elected President of the Australasian Association for Engineering Education (AAEE) in 2011, and leads the Australian and New Zealand regional group of the global CDIO Initiative. As Project Leader for the Interactive Systems Group, Duncan heads research into autonomous Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) decision support, human machine interaction, autonomous mission and path planning, real-time embedded systems, computational intelligence, and intelligent control. He collaborates with a number of universities around the world, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Télécom-Bretagne, Brest, France. Duncan was the Project Leader for Project ResQu, a two year, $7M collaborative research partnership between QUT, CSIRO, Boeing Research & Technology Australia, Insitu Pacific Ltd and the Queensland State Government. Project ResQu focused upon fast-tracking research to help unmanned aircraft become airborne for routine civilian operations sooner, examining both the enabling technologies and the regulatory environment. Duncan supervises ten postgraduate students researching a range of topics around control and automation, and multi-agent systems.

He holds an Electronic Engineer Degree from UNEXPO (Venezuela) and a Master and PhD degrees from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain). Luis’ current research areas are Collision Avoidance and Forced Landing for Unmanned Aerial Systems. In 2012, he was awarded an ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award (2012-2014) to develop automated technologies in aircraft emergency landing scenarios.

He holds a BEng (Mech) and a PhD from the University of Sydney. His research explores the application of UAVs for remote sensing, including bio-inspired optimisation, environmental monitoring and plant biosecurity,  and uncertainty based UAV path planning. He leads the CRC Plant Biosecurity project "Optimising Surveillance Protocols Using Unmanned Aerial Systems", a three year project to assess the effectiveness of UAS fitted with a variety of sensors to effect pest and disease identification, and the Green Falcon Solar Powered UAV. Felipe is a Chartered Professional Engineer and member of professional organisations including the RAeS, IEEE and AIAA. He is also an EDN, iENA Innovation award winner and holds a Private Pilot Licence.

Troy completed his PhD and continued with ARCAA as a Research Fellow working on the Ergon ROAMES project, with his research into automated flight control and flight optimisation for power line inspection leading to the Flight Assist System and enhanced Flight Assist System Projects. In 2014 Troy was the recipient of a QLD State Government Science and Innovation Accelerate Fellowship grant investigating control technologies for teams of UAVs conducting persistent tasks. Troy holds a B.Eng., M.Eng. and PhD degrees in aerospace avionics engineering.

From 2013 Aaron has provided ARCAA with research engineering support, providing the major research components to multiple projects with RMIT University, Thales Australia Ltd and the Plant Biosecurity CRC. During this time Aaron has also provided Queensland University of Technology (QUT) with significant teaching support and course material development. In 2015, Aaron commenced as a QLD State Government Science and Innovation Accelerate Postdoctoral Research Fellow position at ARCAA, working on a 3 year project to develop useful tools to aid the integration of unmanned aircraft into civilian airspace. This project also includes support from Thales Australia and CASA.  Aaron’s current research interests include robotic vision and control for autonomous aircraft navigation in support of unmanned civil airspace integration.

One part of the project focused on the forced-landing phase in which the many possible emergency landing sites detected have to be evaluated for suitability whilst subjected to a number of application criteria. His expertise in multi-criteria decision making and automated flight control was applied to address this research problem. His research interests include evolutionary algorithms, optimisation, path planning, and field programmable gate array technology. In July 2014 Jonathan was awarded his PhD, his thesis examined design methodologies and architectures of hardware-based evolutionary algorithms for aerospace optimisation applications on FPGAs. In 2015, Jonathan was appointed as a Research Associate on the Plant Biosecurity CRC Project "Optimising Surveillance Protocols Using Unmanned Aerial Systems", a three year project to assess the effectiveness of UAS fitted with a variety of sensors to effect pest and disease identification.

In 2013, Peter successfully lead the establishment of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision, a $19M, seven year research collaboration between QUT, University of Adelaide, ANU, Monash University, Oxford, Imperial College, ETH, INRIA and Georgia Tech. In 2014 Peter was awarded the prestigious QUT Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in recognition of exceptional performance and sustained and outstanding achievement. He holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne, is a Fellow of the IEEE, a member of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS), a Member of the AdCom Board of Governors of IEEE RAS and an Officer of the International Federation of Robotics Research.

Professor Roberts' primary research interest is in the area of field robotics and in particular making machines operate autonomously in unstructured environments. Jonathan graduated from the University of Southampton, UK, in 1991 with an Honours degree in Aerospace Systems Engineering. Jonathan furthered his interest in computer vision while completing a PhD (1991-1994) at the University of Southampton where he also developed skills in parallel computing. In 1995 Jonathan joined CSIRO (Australia’s largest government research agency) where he went on to lead the Autonomous Systems Laboratory. Jonathan was a co-inventor of the UAV Challenge Outback Rescue, and he is still an active leader of the Challenge today. Jonathan was President of the Australian Robotics & Automation Association from 2007-2008, and between 2008 and 2013 was Deputy Director of ARCAA.

Professor Perez's research covers projects such as Agricultural robotics, Bio-inspired guidance and motion control of unmanned aircraft (collaboration with UQ and Boeing), and Energy-based modelling and motion control of field robots (collaboration with UoN and DSTO). He leads ARCAA's research domain on Robust Autonomy.

Matthew is known internationally for his research into field robotics, particularly environmental robots, and their application to large-scale marine habitat and aquatic greenhouse gas monitoring. He has wide research interests including adaptive sampling and path planning, vision-based navigation, cooperative robotics, as well as robot and sensor network interactions. Matthew received his BEng (Aerospace) from RMIT and his PhD from QUT. Matthew is a strong advocate of robotic systems in civilian applications, and is currently the President of the Australian Robotics and Automation Association (ARAA).

At QUT, Ben is a CI with both the Queensland Agricultural Robotics Centre (focusing upon the creation of lightweight intelligent farm equipment to lead to long-term productivity gains in the agricultural sector), and also the ARC Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision. His interests are in computer vision applied to mobile robots, as evidenced through his work on Project ResQu investigating how 3D environment modelling using computer vision can aid in detecting potential landing sites for UA emergency landings. Previously Ben has worked at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics (University of Sydney) and with CRCMining (UQ).

Assoc. Prof. Ford holds BSc, BE and PhD degrees from the Australian National University, Canberra. Prior to joining QUT, Assoc. Prof. Ford held positions at the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO), and the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Canberra. His research interests include advanced signal processing and control for aerospace.

In 2014 Brendan was on secondment from Boeing Research & Technology Australia to QUT as an Adjunct Associate Professor, leading the Risk and Regulation stream of Project ResQu. In 2014 Brendan was the recipient of the prestigious QUT Vice-Chancellor’s Awards for Excellence for the Power of Engineering Inc. Foundation Team, which strives for attitudinal change towards female stereotypes in non-tradition careers. In addition, Brendan is one of Boeing’s representatives on CASA’s UAS Working Group, which is reviewing UAS guidance and regulatory material. He was admitted as an Associate Technical Fellow within the Boeing Technical Fellowship in 2002, and was awarded a Senior Membership of the IEEE in 2009.

He has a BEng (Electrical/Electronics), a Diploma in Project Management, and the OLAE post graduate qualification at Cranfield, UK. As a former military officer, Associate Professor Martin completed a Chief of Army sponsored PhD in Applied Signal Processing, gaining skills in applied pattern classification and machine learning. He subsequently spent time at Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) as a military fellow, before taking on a number of roles in aerospace equipment acquisition and management. Associate Professor Martin has significant experience across a variety of fixed and rotary wing platforms, including RPAS, alongside expertise in military flight simulation acquisition and accreditation. He is currently conducting research and student supervision surrounding RPAS and their integration into the NAS. He has published a number of internationally peer-reviewed articles in diverse fields including remotely piloted aircraft systems, multilingual speech recognition and Key Word Spotting.

Dmitry holds a BEng (Hons), MEng (Avionics) and a PhD in navigation and control systems from the Bauman Moscow State Technical University. Dmitry contributed to the improvements of DAA system and also conducted the important sensitivity analysis of INS accuracy on DAA system key performance metrics. The outcomes of the analysis lead to the system cost reduction of 5-7 times, which has provided a strong foundation for the commercialisation of the DAA system. Prior to QUT Dmitry worked at Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Munich on the high-precision GNSS airborne gravimetry, and at Russian avionics leaders in accordance with DO­-178B/C Level A. At the end of Project ResQu Dmitry worked as an Associate Lecture within QUT's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science School, and in 2015 rejoined ARCAA as a Research Engineer.

Prior to joining ARCAA Gavin was Lead RC pilot and Co-designer with Kasama helicopters (Thailand) working on the prototype DTI-KSM150, a 38kg naval UAV helicopter; and the world renowned Kasama Dune 600. He concurrently provided demonstration flights for Kasama products in a global tour. In 2015 Gavin contributed to many successful flight trials as designer, fabricator and pilot. The preparation of UAV’s for the plant biosecurity PBSCRC remote sensing projects and designing the new camera pod for ARCAA’s airborne systems laboratory. Gavin also mentored students about UAV’s from the University of Washington for the 2015 study abroad program.

Dean’s position as Air Operations Manager is to provide guidance and expertise in all areas of Manned and Unmanned Aviation. Dean's background is in Aviation Maintenance (Aircraft Technician) trained by the RAAF and is an aircraft owner/operator and active Pilot holding a Commercial Licence and a Multi-Engine Command Instrument Rating. Previously Dean has held the position of Chief UAV Controller at Insitu Pacific; Chief UAV Instructor and Evaluator for Insitu Pacific ScanEagle operations, and subsequently filled positions at Kendall Airlines as an Operations Training Instructor and Dangerous Goods Manager. Dean joined Boeing in 2005 and completed training in Clovis New Mexico before deploying to Iraq with the Australian Army in 2006 and 2007.

He leads a small team of administrative, technical and operational staff that facilitates the research activities that ARCAA engages in. Andrew’s role incorporates elements of operations, business development and project management, and has acted in these domains across large-scale collaborative projects since joining ARCAA in 2010. Andrew holds a BSc (Physics) and a PGDipSc (Physics) from the University of Queensland, and an MBA (Strategy & Leadership) from QUT.

With close to four decades experience in Information Technology, Aviation and Hardware & Software design, both in Australia and Germany, Dirk contributes to a wide range of engineering tasks with a primary focus on Software Engineering. Dirk completed his undergraduate degree in Informatics at the Technical University of Clausthal (Germany) and a Research Master degree in IT at the University of Queensland. Dirk discovered his passion in aviation in the 1970s with flying gliders and model aircraft. He currently holds an Australian Private Pilot Licence, a CASA UAV Controller Certificate, a German Ultralight Licence with instructor rating and a German Hangglider Licence.